Eisige Helden: Kälte, Emotionen, und Geschlecht in Literatur und Kunst vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart by Inge Stephan (review)

Inge Stephan’s Eisige Helden is a tour de force and a towering achievement. The book explores discourses and metaphors of cold, ice, and snow as they relate to gender, emotional dispositions, and sociopolitical developments, ranging from the Cold War to cryogenics and the climate crisis. The scope of the project is truly impressive. Stephan analyzes a large corpus of texts from the nineteenth century to the present, including different genres and media such as novels, poems, radio plays, comics, film, visual art, and music. She is interested in both canonical texts and popular entertainment, offering perceptive readings of Adorno’s and Oskar Negt’s notions of “soziale Kälte” (social cold) as well as of Reinhold Messner’s memoirs and Katarina Witt’s Carmen on Ice (1989).

Stephan opens with an insightful analysis of Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (1823–24; The sea of ice), which influenced artists such as Gerhard Richter and Klaus Staeck. The painting ties the polar region to discourses of the sublime and captures the fragility of human existence amid a nature that threatens to engulf us— even as we work to destroy it. Stephan then traces how metaphors of cold and snow are used to depict existential crises, exile, alienation, or political stagnation in a variety of texts, ranging from Schubert’s Winterreise (1827; Winter journey) to Büchner’s Lenz (1839) and Heine’s Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (1844; Germany, A Winter’s Tale, 1906).

Throughout, Stephan is particularly interested in the links between cold metaphors and gender discourses that characterize narratives of polar conquest and even tales such as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1846). In addition, she devotes a chapter to arctic travelers who were forgotten or left behind, such as Matthew Henson, the author of A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912) and subject of Simon Schwartz’s graphic novel Packeis (2012; Pack ice), and the Inuit Minik, who was brought to New York by Robert Edwin Peary in 1897.

Unsurprisingly, a large number of texts that deal with the polar regions offer either a celebration or deconstruction of famous arctic explorers. Stefan Zweig, for example, depicts Scott as a tragic hero in his Der Kampf um den Südpol (1927; Fight for the South Pole, 1940), which forms part of his Sternstunden der Menschheit (Decisive Moments in History). Sten Nadolny’s Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit (1983; The Discovery of Slowness, 1987) centers on John Franklin while Jo Lendle’s Alles Land (2011; All the Land, 2018) offers a portrait of the geophysicist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener, who originated the theory of continental drift . Critiques of polar explorations include Lion Feuchtwanger’s Polfahrt (1928; Polar Expedition, 1935), which highlights the egomania of Umberto Nobile, who attempted to reach the North Pole in his airship, and Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984; The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, 1991), which includes citations from historical documents relating to the Tegetthoffexpedition.

Although the overwhelming majority of polar explorers were male, Stephan highlights the contributions of women. Josephine Peary, for example, was a member of her husband’s expedition and documented her experiences in My Arctic Journal (1893). Similarly, Christiane Ritter, a talented painter and illustrator, who spent time in Spitzbergen, criticizes heroic arctic discourses in her Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht (1938; A Woman in the Polar Night, 1954). Leni Riefenstahl wrote about the experience of filming S.O.S. Eisberg (1933; S.O.S. Iceberg, 1933) and Die weiße Hölle von Piz Palü (1929; White Hell of Pitz Palu, 1930) in Kampf in Schnee und Eis (1933; Struggle in snow and ice).

A subset of texts that link metaphors of cold to the political realm associate coldness with fascism. In Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenburg (2008; Kaltenburg, 2012), a Nazi zoologist embodies the...